Doom: The Dark Ages Review – Welcome Back to (Bullet) Hell

The reboot of Doom from 2016 is still somewhat of a miracle. After Doom 3 steered too far away from the series’ roots, fans were desperate for a classic Doom experience. While Doom 3 was a great game on its own, it wasn’t really a ‘Doom game’. Narrow, dark corridors with slow, horror-focused gameplay weren’t exactly what the series was known for. 

And so in 2016, id Software proved to everyone that they have what it takes to make a great Doom game. The reboot was everything the fans ever wanted from Doom, but modernised for the next-gen era. Doom Eternal was more of a mixed bag with fans. With a heavy emphasis on story and platforming, Doom Eternal’s combat was fast and fluid but interspersed with content that wasn’t ‘Doom enough’. 

Fast-forward to 2025, and we have Doom: The Dark Ages. It’s the third game in the reboot series and serves as a prequel to Doom 2016. It aims to bridge the gap between the previous two games in terms of gameplay while also offering an easy entry point for new fans of the series. But with so many fans alienated by Doom Eternal, can Doom: The Dark Ages win them back and chart a new path forward for the classic shooter series?

TL;DR

Doom: The Dark Ages is a worthy successor that blends the best elements of Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal in one. It introduces fresh gameplay mechanics with a focus on dodging and parrying, all wrapped in an exciting medieval setting. While its story isn’t anything special, no one plays Doom for the plot, so it’s not a big loss.

Story – Going Back to the Past

Doom: The Dark Ages is a prequel to the reboot series. It takes place in a seemingly medieval setting mixed with futuristic technology. It’s a refreshing setting that we don’t often see in action games, allowing id Software to really let their imagination go wild. As usual, we play as the Slayer, an ancient warrior fighting the forces of Hell, one bullet at a time. 

Just like in the previous two reboot games, the Slayer is a character with very little to say about the plot that’s happening around him. His task is to eliminate evil and go back to sleep until the next time he’s needed. It’s a bit unfortunate that Doom: The Dark Ages takes the same approach to the story as its predecessors. While there is a story here, it happens around the Slayer with him being nothing more than a passenger, taking it all in. 

Side characters are introduced, motivations are explained, and plot twists come and go. But as it all happens, the Slayer simply stares at the camera and lets other characters talk, make decisions, and ultimately act as protagonists to the story. In this sense, there’s an argument to be made about the role of the story in Doom: The Dark Ages to begin with. It exists only to glue different levels together and give the player some context as to why they’re in a specific location and what’s happening at the moment. 

Games like Halo also have near-silent protagonists, yet they’ve found ways to make them active participants in their stories. We can only hope that Doom follows the same path one day, but Doom: The Dark Ages doesn’t go in that direction nearly as much as we had hoped it would.

Gameplay – Between Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal

Doom Eternal was a divisive game for the fans of the series. Besides a heavy focus on the story, it also introduced platforming elements that many felt were unnecessary in a Doom game. After all, these games are supposed to be about running and gunning, right? On the other hand, Doom Eternal has its fans, and opinions are split on whether or not it was the right direction for the series at the time.

Doom: The Dark Ages takes it down a notch in terms of platforming and goes back to what made Doom 2016 so great. The focus is now on fighting hordes of enemies with various weapons and much more ammo than you ever had in Doom Eternal. You’ll never feel like the game is forcing you to use specific weapons for different enemies, something that made Eternal’s arenas feel like a match of rock, paper, scissors for many players.

Doom: The Dark Ages features freeform combat that lets the player express themselves through different playstyles, with unique weapons and upgrades that feel distinct from one another. Most importantly, ammo is abundant at every moment, and you’ll never feel like you’re stuck with a weapon you hate.

Platforming has been minimised and relegated mostly to finding secrets, which will also please Doom fans. Overall, it’s a healthy mix of what the previous two games did right, with just enough innovation to keep players hooked for another 20 hours of fighting demons.

Dodging and Parrying Hordes of Demons

Speaking of innovation, Doom: The Dark Ages embraces its medieval setting through the Slayer’s design. He wears a fur coat and uses a shield alongside a flail and various weapons with era-appropriate designs. The shield is the biggest innovation here, as it allows you to traverse the environment, block enemy attacks and parry incoming bullets. 

Blocking and parrying are major mechanics in this game, and you’ll have to get used to them quickly. Otherwise, you won’t survive even the most basic encounters. Doom: The Dark Ages features two types of enemy attacks, coded in green and orange. Orange attacks cannot be parried, and you can either dodge or block them. Green attacks can be parried and returned to the enemies, dealing massive damage and stunning bigger enemies. 

Parrying has become a very popular mechanic in recent times, with Clair Obscur Expedition 33 also embracing it even though it’s a turn-based RPG. Doom: The Dark Ages is a shooter with very snappy and well-designed parry mechanics that players will enjoy using. While it may feel unnatural at first, it’s a very engaging and addictive mechanic that adds a lot to the gameplay.

Linear VS Open Level Design

Following along with the Halo parallels, Doom: The Dark Ages introduces open-ended level design into the reboot series. While the original Doom games had open levels with sprawling map design, the reboot series played things more safely. Now, we have linear levels mixed with open-ended ones to introduce some much-needed variety into the formula. 

Open levels allow you to tackle objectives in any order you want, explore different environments to find secret areas and hidden collectables, and just take things at your own pace. However, these open levels suffer from pretty severe pacing issues. Doom is all about high-octane action, and Doo:m The Dark Ages struggles with open-ended levels in terms of combat balancing. 

You’ll often fight dozens of enemies at once, spawning all around you, with no clear logic to the combat arena. This is because Doom: The Dark Ages lets you play these encounters in any order you want and from any direction you want. Meaning, you’ll rarely come across carefully balanced combat encounters that feel organic, like they did in Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal. 

However, the traditional linear levels play as you’d expect, with fine-tuned encounters and enemy balancing. Whether or not the open-ended levels were a worthwhile addition to the series will depend on your preferences. Oftentimes, they feel like Halo levels, and in a good way. But Halo is a much slower game, so they feel more at home in that series.

Mixing Things Up with Robots and Dragons

To ensure that the gameplay loop stays fresh for the third game in the reboot series, Doom: The Dark Ages introduces vehicle levels. Specifically, you’ll get to play as a giant robot and ride an ancient dragon as the Slayer. 

These levels aim to spice up the formula by letting you fight giant enemies, fly around different levels, and take a break from the usual running and gunning. While they offer a nice distraction, they’re nothing more than that. Your moves are severely limited when you’re in a robot or riding a dragon, taking away most of the fun out of the experience. 

You’re also much slower as a robot and much more vulnerable because of it. Doom: The Dark Ages doesn’t have a lot of these levels, but they’re a nice distraction from the regular missions. It’s just a shame that id Software didn’t go a step further with them since they’re already present in the game.

Visuals – Buttery-Smooth Spectacle

Doom: The Dark Ages is built on the latest version of id Tech. It’s one of the most impressive engines on the market due to it being built in-house by id Software. This means that it’s built specifically to run games like Doom, ensuring that the engine itself has the features necessary to bring id’s latest game to life as intended.

Visually, the game doesn’t look much better than Doom Eternal, and that’s not a negative. All three of these games look stunning and run even better. The id Tech engine has proven to be a versatile and stable engine that offers a great experience for players on all platforms. Likewise, it ensures that the games don’t take up 100+ GB of storage space thanks to smart compression algorithms.

Stylistically, the game is a medieval sci-fi shooter with a unique blend of ancient castles, villages, and temples mixed with futuristic technology and weapons. It’s a very organic blend that doesn’t feel out of place whatsoever. The Slayer’s design is equally impressive, reflecting the period and the character’s supernatural nature. Enemy designs are mostly the same as seen in previous Doom games, but they’ve been tweaked to look more medieval. 

The same can be said for weapons, as you’ll use the standard assortment of shotguns, machineguns, plasma rifles, and more—but with an old-school twist. Standouts include a spread weapon that grinds human skulls to shoot them at enemies and a ball-and-chain gun that shoots an iron ball at enemies and retracts it toward you. It’s a fun and diverse set of gadgets that you’ll never grow tired of using.

Solid on PS5 and PC, Rocky on the Steam Deck

We began testing Doom: The Dark Ages on PlayStation 5, where we truly had an amazing time with the game. It features smooth 60 FPS with several visual options you can fine-tune to your needs. However, the game doesn’t feature a 30 FPS mode whatsoever, being optimised for a native 60 FPS experience from the start. This is a great decision on id Software’s part, as games like these need 60 FPS to feel good to play. We also experienced no crashes or glitches during our time with Doom: The Dark Ages, which is high praise in 2025.

We also tested Doom: The Dark Ages on an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D with 32GB of DDR5 RAM and an Nvidia RTX 5080 with the latest set of drivers. Although the game prompts you to update your drivers on first launch, we decided not to and were treated to a smooth experience anyway. We chose the highest settings preset and never experienced a dip, stutter, or crash. Doom: The Dark Ages worked as intended from start to finish on PC.

On the Steam Deck, however, things were a bit different for us. While the game is Steam Deck Verified, just like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, it doesn’t really run well. Forced Ray Tracing severely hinders the experience on the Steam Deck, with dips below 30 FPS. This is a huge negative for a game that requires precise movement, blocks, and parries.

The game is somewhat playable on the lowest settings preset, but it’s also very blurry and prone to framerate drops. We recommend playing the game on a dedicated PC instead.

Audio – Ripping and Tearing to Great Music

Audio design is a big component of Doom, and it doesn’t disappoint this time around. Every weapon in your arsenal feels heavy and powerful, from shooting to reloading and swapping during combat. The same can be said for melee attacks, running, jumping, and other actions. The Slayer feels like a walking tank, and he sounds like i,t too. This is the thickest and heaviest he’s felt in the reboot series, and it’s a pleasure to simply hear all of the sound effects associated with moving him around.

One of the most recognisable parts of the rebooted Doom trilogy is its soundtrack. Doom: The Dark Ages follows the previous two games with an equally stunning soundtrack that beautifully complements the action happening on the screen.  Every level has distinct music purposefully composed for different events, combat encounters, boss fights, and cutscenes. 

However, this is the third time we’re listening to the same style of music in the series, with a heavy metal score and subtle but much-appreciated vocals. If you were a fan of Doom 2016 and Doom Eternal soundtracks, Doom: The Dark Ages will satiate your thirst for great heavy metal, now inspired by medieval motifs. But if you were hoping for more innovation in this department, you won’t find it this time around.

Conclusion – Should You Play Doom: The Dark Ages?

Doom: The Dark Ages is a great shooter and a solid third entry in the reboot series. What’s also notable is the fact that it features a distinct gameplay style when compared to the previous two titles. 

With Doom 2016 being a more traditional shooter and Doom Eternal being focused on platforming, Doom: The Dark Ages is a shooter with a heavy emphasis on blocking and parrying. This makes it unique not only in the series but also on the shooter market in general. If you’re a fan of Doom, you owe it to yourself to play this one, as it’s a worthy sequel in a series you already love. 

First-time Doom players will also find plenty to love here because the game is built as a prequel, so no prior knowledge is required for you to jump in and fight hordes of demons. Doom: The Dark Ages is now available on PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5, as well as Game Pass.

Huge thanks to AVE for sponsoring our review!